Courage Under Fire

Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior

James B. Stockdale

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780817936938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

When physical disability from combat wounds brought about Jim Stockdale's early retirement from military life, he had the distinction of being the only three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor. His writings have been many and varied, but all converge on the central theme of how man can rise with dignity to prevail in the face of adversity.

COURAGE UNDER FIRE

Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior

James Bond Stockdale

Speech delivered at the Great Hall, King’s College, London, Monday, November 15, 1993.

I came to the philosophic life as a thirty-eight-year-old naval pilot in grad school at Stanford University. I had been in the navy for twenty years and scarcely ever out of a cockpit. In 1962, I began my second year of studying international relations so I could become a strategic planner in the Pentagon. But my heart wasn’t in it. I had yet to be inspired at Stanford and saw myself as just processing tedious material about how nations organized and governed themselves. I was too old for that. I knew how political systems operated; I had been beating systems for years.

Then, in what we call a “feel out pass” in stunt flying, I cruised into Stanford’s philosophy corner one winter morning. I was gray-haired and in civilian clothes. A voice boomed out of an office, “Can I help you?” The speaker was Philip Rhinelander, dean of Humanities and Sciences, who taught Philosophy 6: The Problems of Good and Evil.

At first he thought I was a professor, but we soon found common ground in the navy because he’d served in World War II. Within fifteen minutes we’d agreed that I would enter his two-term course in the middle, and to make up for my lack of background, I would meet him for an hour a week for a private tutorial in the study of his campus home.

Phil Rhinelander opened my eyes. In that study it all happened for me—my inspiration, my dedication to the philosophic life. From then on, I was out of international relations—I already had enough credits for the master’s—and into philosophy. We went from Job to Socrates to Aristotle to Descartes. And then on to Kant, Hume, Dostoyevsky, Camus. All the while, Rhinelander was psyching me out, trying to figure out what I was seeking. He thought my interest in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was quite interesting. On my last session, he reached high in his wall of books and brought down a copy of The Enchiridion. He said, “I think you’ll be interested in this.”

Enchiridion means “ready at hand.” In other words, it’s a hand book. Rhinelander explained that its author, Epictetus, was a very unusual man of intelligence and sensitivity, who gleaned wisdom rather than bitterness from his early firsthand exposure to extreme cruelty and firsthand observations of the abuse of power and self-indulgent debauchery.

Epictetus was born a slave in about A.D. 50 and grew up in Asia Minor speaking the Greek language of his slave mother. At the age of fifteen or so, he was loaded off to Rome in chains in a slave caravan. He was treated savagely for months while en route. He went on the Rome auction block as a permanent cripple, his knee having been shattered and left untreated. He was “bought cheap” by a freedman named Epaphroditus, a secretary to Emperor Nero. He was taken to live at the Nero White House at a time when the emperor was neglecting the empire as he frequently toured Greece as actor, musician, and chariot race driver. When home in Rome in his personal quarters, Nero was busy having his half-brother killed, his wife killed, his mother killed, his second wife killed. Finally, it was Epictetus’s master Epaphroditus who cut Nero’s throat when he fumbled his own suicide as the soldiers were breaking down his door to arrest him.

That put Epaphroditus under a cloud, and, fortuitously, the now cagey slave Epictetus realized he had the run of Rome. And being a serious and doubtless disgusted young man, he gravitated to the high-minded public lectures of the Stoic teachers who were the philosophers of Rome in those days. Epictetus eventually became apprenticed to the very best Stoic teacher in the empire, Musonius Rufus, and, after ten or more years of study, achieved the status of philosopher in his own right. With that came true freedom in Rome, and the preciousness of that was duly celebrated by the former slave. Scholars have calculated that in his works individual freedom is praised six times more frequently than it is in the New Testament. The Stoics held that all human beings were equal in the eyes of God: male/female, black/white, slave and free.

I read every one of Epictetus’s extant writings twice, through two translators. Even with the most conservative translators, Epictetus comes across speaking like a modern person. It is “living speech,” not the literary Attic Greek we’re used to in men of that tongue. The Enchiridion was actually penned not by Epictetus, who was above all else a determined teacher and man of modesty who would never take the time to transcribe his own lectures, but by one of his most meticulous and determined students. The student’s name was Arrian, a very smart, aristocratic Greek in his twenties. After hearing his first few lectures, he is reported to have exclaimed something like, “Son of a gun! We’ve got to get this guy down on parchment!”

With Epictetus’s consent, Arrian took down his words verbatim in some kind of frantic shorthand he devised. He bound the lectures into books; in the two y...